Books & Papers

Gomory is President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Baumol is Director, C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics. Through mathematics and general conceptual overview, Gomory, Baumol show the difference between classical economics and today's complex and modern economies. This text also highlights scenarios where global trade isn't necessarily a "non zero sum game". An excellent primer on global trade theory.

Tonelson has truly been a voice for statistical reality. This in depth study of globalization practices casts a foreboding shadow to the decimation of America's middle class. Many of Tonelson's essays on reprinted on the American Economic Alert web site.

A harsh look at globalization practices. Forever the Cassandra of fiscal policy and "new economy" fallacy, Fingleton correctly predicted the collapse of the "dot com" era when few would heed his warning.

Our trade deficit increases by $2 billion a day. Pharmaceutical companies and their lobbyists have such influence in Washington that Medicare, by current law, is not allowed to negotiate lower drug prices. We import oil on an ever-increasing scale, putting ourselves into debt with the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and other Middle Eastern nations. With their windfall profits, they continue to buy American assets. China's booming economy and abundance of cheap labor are threatening our economic survival. We have mortgaged our fortunes, our principles, and our way of life.

The authors identify the ten major reasons employers send jobs overseas. Apart from lower wages and salaries, companies benefit from favorable tax policies, access to emerging markets, and other incentives — including the fact that companies face no penalty for destroying their U.S. jobs. The book also articulates the profound effect that outsourcing is having on educational and career trends, and how developing nations like India and China are retaining top talent that previously would have come to the United States.

Gives individual accounts of guest worker abuses that is outright slavery and criminal. Gives strong insight in the ultimate result of global labor arbitrage and migration. Has a few policy suggestions to stop this morally abhorrent situation.

Gives a great history on the many efforts and failures to penetrate China's markets by foreign business interests. Shows how China is not a capitalistic market economy and throws some cold water on the realities of the mythical 13B consumer market that is often touted to justify bad trade agreements.

Modern U.S., laissez-faire is a pretense. Government power and preferment have been used by the rich, not shunned. As wealth concentration grows, especially near the crest of a drawn-out boom, so has upper-bracket control of politics and its ability to shape its own preferment." In the next 474 pages, Phillips goes on to cover the "political and economic history of U.S. wealth, the U.S. record of speculative finance, the Anglo-Saxon proclivity for technology manias, the overlap between watershed technological innovation and economic inequality, and the connections between wealth concentration and the corruption of politics, government, and public policy.